


A Price to be Paid

by CyrenKnight



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Mermaids, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-18 23:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20321362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyrenKnight/pseuds/CyrenKnight
Summary: “If we bring it to your witch, do you think she could do for you what she did for me...?”“You want to be a mermaid?”“No… I want to be a girl.”





	A Price to be Paid

**Author's Note:**

> This was my zine piece for https://lionpridezines.tumblr.com/, which I am still really proud of.

Mermaids are practical. They can be coral brown for camouflage and feel as slick as their seal skin that they can leave in hidden coves. They can be transparent with bioluminescent eyes and as delicate as marrow. They can have their seaweed colored hair twisted into dreadlocks to hide their young amongst and can sting like anemones.

They can have gills along their throbbing ribs and solid black eyes on either side of their head and sleep belly up. They can have noses without cartilage that smell blood from leagues away and wear their own rows and rows of lost teeth as jewelry, a sign of victorious battles and the sacrifice that comes with winning them.

Kalcyne knew this, so the envy he felt when he saw a drowned human was immeasurable. How badly he wanted to look like anything but a mermaid, no matter the kind.

“_ They come in cold rubber casing with glass eyes. They taste awful until it’s taken off—the real meat is underneath _.” He had been promised this by his school of siblings, all with their own different encounters.

Peeling away the layer of rubber had revealed water bloated skin, as intimate as mermaid songs exposed to open air. The human wasn’t meant to be seen like this; the songs weren’t meant to be heard by Other Creatures. Songs were a call of the tide, of magic, of emotions; the human’s body sang.

Kalcyne had never been one to sing. He’d always been rather quiet in choral lessons, more interested in the drowned archeology of sunken ships. This human, glorious and intact, made him despair, bubbles of music floating up from him.

He sang a song of want, the ocean dyed red as he devoured her in envy.

The curves of the human’s body, the cellulite on her thighs, the soft set of her jaw, all of it, all of it. He wanted it. He devoured it, making her one with himself.

When the song and the frenzy was over, he was still as he’d always been. But now, he had a name to pair with the broiling feeling in his gut and names were important. Names gave things power. Desire, Longing, Desperation; good things came in threes.

He corkscrewed himself around the dissipating remnants of blood-water and bone, decorating himself with her rib cage as an accessory to his new victory. Once home, his school of siblings were immeasurably jealous.

“_ How pristine, how intact! _” They had bemoaned their loss. Perhaps, for once, they should have accompanied their peculiar brother on one of his unusual exploits after all. But he’d slept in it, a rib broken, his prize destroyed, his siblings no longer interested.

But he still had his three names and knew of one more name that was important, that was taboo, that was forbidden. His father’s first wife, Mehyt. He’d found her while digging through a collection of human relics, of human trash, in an eternally dying reef. She had been banished there. He’d been told her sacrifice had been too great, too much to the collective, to never venture out that far ever again. Kalcyne always felt she had been wronged, but as long as he never offered her help, he was always allowed to keep his blasphemous thoughts.

The first time he felt the scales peel from his skin, it was liberating.

“_ It will cost you. _” She warned, but he had nothing of value to lose. He offered whatever the witch wanted without hesitation. Mehyt pitied him. She still scorned her ex-lover, but this gave her more reason to. How unloved he must be to love nothing of himself, not a skill about him, nothing he owned, or nothing he showed interest in.

He screamed, a prelude to her étude, then almost drowned in what had once been his home; he almost drowned in her wants and wishes, in her magic. “_ What else? _”

Kalcyne buried himself under the shoreline like a flatfish. “_ I have nothing else to give. _”

“_ If you want it enough, there is always something.” _ Mehyt cast the second spell anyway, added silence to delight, sh to e. _ “You have a year to bring me the price of this magic, to bring me human tears brought on by different emotions. I will give you one more task, if you want it. The reward will be great, will be without question. _” Kalcyne listened to her request for the impossible, but took refuge in the second task being optional.

Kalcyne was left on the shore, their old life leagues under the sea. Here, Kalcyne could be anything he wanted—he could be neither and either of anything. Kalcyne didn't have to present as a he and a mermaid; Kalcyne could be a they and a human.

They were fleshy, they were vulnerable, they were exposed, and worst of all, they were liberated. Kalcyne had never realized how deep sea pressure had forced everything that mattered into the very end of their caudal fin.

Their fin was gone. Everything that mattered was up in the air. The skyline promised higher altitudes. Kalcyne struggled, crawling, rolling, flailing. How did humans move out of water? It was impossible to get anywhere.

They dragged themselves by their arms along the vicious outcrop to human roads, leaving a trail of blood. They were a stonefish being ruined by stone. It was exhausting. It was cold. Humans weren’t intended to be this exposed. No wonder they wore rubbery casing. Useless, sausage-like bodies. Exhausting things. Perhaps, this was the cost of Kalcyne’s desires.

A price to be paid in blood.

* * *

When Kalcyne woke, they were in a cave where the walls were smooth and an even distance apart; they were dreadfully boring. They were tucked under mossball soft sheets of cloth, their stomach wrapped into bloody seaweed-like strips. They were tucked into rubber casings like humans, but it was in the same material as the sheets.

Perhaps the humans intended to eat their eyes. Kalcyne didn’t know if humans ate other humans, but mermaids didn’t waste other mermaids unless they were important or cursed. Kalcyne wasn’t going to wait around to find out. There was a thud resounding in the room, a glittering sound like chimes from a lampshade.

The first time he was called she, it was healing.

“_ The girl is awake! _” To be seen as she felt was indescribable enough to let her be manhandled, lifted back into the bed. The humans spoke much too quickly to catch anything else they said, even in their wide net of knowledge. Human words were complicated and not universal. Mermaids only had seven languages, one for each sea, whereas humans had too many just because.

Kalcyne thought the human girl that entered the room looked the most delicious, the most well groomed. Well groomed and lean meant they tasted better. Kalcyne was hungry. Once she was close enough, Kalcyne bit her.

Skin was barely broken, most of her teeth flat and unpractical. “_ Seaweed-eater?! _” Kalcyne howled in despair, in the language of the oldest sea, The Forgotten Sea. She resigned herself to die then and there over never eating meat again. The well groomed one had been pulled back by the other humans, another flurry of words and a weapon pointed at her. Kalcyne turned to her side, exposing her ribs where her gills would have been, ready and willing to stop breathing.

The well-groomed human asked her in butchered sea-speak if she was hungry. Then, Kalcyne was fed.

* * *

The well-groomed human was so much like Kalcyne. She adored the sea; adored what little she knew of its residents, what scraps she found of their civilizations. Kalcyne had stopped calling her the well-groomed human and had started calling her Theodora, but she kept calling her delectable. This, for some reason, made Theodora laugh. Some humans called Theodora “_ Quincy _”, bitterly, as if in insult. Kalcyne didn’t know what a Quincy was or why it needed to hurt.

They traded words, information, a culture that was no longer artifacts for either of them. They had called Kalcyne’s home Atlantis. They excavated understanding, both of them archaeologists. There was a spark of life, there was a spark of something else. Kalcyne had never been in love with anything tangible before.

Theodora had a brother who Kalcyne didn’t have an opinion on until she had overheard hissing, an argument. _ He, him, absurd, boy, Quincy needs to stop playing this game of dress up. _ Kalcyne learned humans were preposterous and had gender attached to their names, rather than names being used as individual titles to address things. She decided she hated Theodora’s brother. She called him abrnogth, which meant the lowest of low and lower than that, the way they unfairly called Theodora _ Quincy _.

Kalcyne learned Theodora was like she was. Kalcyne learned Theodora wasn’t happy. Kalcyne told Theodora a secret. It had the kind of seriousness that came with Theodora telling her that she had to keep her mermaid heritage a secret, that humans were cruel and selfish. Then, she told Kalcyne she was looking for something in the human world to keep her secret as a forever, not as a for now.

“_ If we bring it to your witch, do you think she could do for you what she did for me...? _”

“_ You want to be a mermaid? _”

“_ No… I want to be a girl. _”

“_ But you are one. They just don’t see it. _” For some reason, this made Theodora weep. Kalcyne didn’t know humans could make water from themselves, but Kalcyne could see why Mehyt wanted them as payment. Kalcyne put the shimmering crystal things into a small vial, deciding she would also bring Mehyt fire, her optional quest.

She would give Theodora the feeling in her own chest, even if she had to carve it out through her scars that littered her torso. She told Theodora more secrets. Theodora told her one of hers. Kalcyne wasn’t sure how to bottle a confession the way she had her tears. She didn’t know how to prove it was real, was precious. Theodora suggested a kiss. Kalcyne decided that would do, even if she didn’t know what a kiss was or why it was important.

* * *

Theodora poured over science, human magic, while Kalcyne pored over mermaid magic. Fire needed oxygen to survive. Water had oxygen in it, but water itself extinguished fire. There had to have been something there, in that paradox, in that conundrum. The answer had been in lightning.

The answer had made Theodora press her mouth to hers. Kalcyne decided she liked kisses, whatever importance or insignificance they held. Mermaids didn’t kiss, mermaids coiled their tails together. Holding hands or tangling their legs together as they slept was a close second that made her flush.

Holding hands while they kissed made Kalcyne feel absolutely uncivilized, absolutely wild like a sea snake. She had associated hand holding with kisses, kisses with the intimacy and the excitement of hand holding.

Theodora didn’t kiss her when she hadn’t shaved her face. Kalcyne thought it was absurd, but offered to shave her face if that’s all it took to get more kisses. Theodora had found she was surprisingly capable with a razor blade.

“_ What was it like—your transition? _ ” Theodora had asked, buried under moss-soft blankets. _ Blankets _. The word was fun. Kalcyne told her how she felt at home in her own body. How she felt comfortable. How there was no longer a desperate urge of longing. How she loved herself more honestly than she had before.

It wasn’t to say she disliked or hated herself, she just knew something had gone wrong at some point when she was an egg. There was the looming anxiety that someone would notice, that someone would expose her. She was weary of the ridicule. Kalcyne thought Theodora was brave to endure the ridicule to be able to show people who she should have been.

Kalcyne’s toes curled from the kiss. Tomorrow they would leave. Tomorrow, they would ask Mehyt for her magic in exchange for the lightning in a bottle. Tomorrow, Theodora wouldn’t have to ever hear the name _ Quincy _again—Kalcyne would ensure the name was dead, its corpse miles away from the deep sea they were going home to.

* * *

Lightning in a bottle had been practical, had been a salvageable answer to the quandary Mehyt posed. There had been nerves, had been doubt, had been hesitation. Theodora had brought other offerings for the sea witch, intent on gaining her favor, even if Kalcyne already had it.

The witch was bitter, but she was no liar. She asked Theodora a seemingly useless slew of questions, all making her hair stand on end. She was told to wait on shore, then told to swallow a pear whole, that she deserved to be this kind of fish because of her answers.

Kalcyne sang a song of hope, of longing, of love as Theodora screamed, fell to her knees. Mehyt made it a duet of suffering that comes with loss, with change. Theodora had only ever heard second hand of barely won tales of mermaid songs, of music that would drown you. Theodora could no longer drown in the ocean or in cruel words.

The vibrant hot pink warning of Theodora’s tail suited her, a rockfish just like Kalcyne.

“_ What else? _”

“_ One year on land, one year on sea, every year until we die. _” They couldn’t forego either home, either collection of childhood. Neither would they forego the reminders of the struggle they endured to become the girls they deserved to be.

“_ It will be four years or none at all. _” They had agreed, fingers and fins twined together, magic cast, a bite of each other’s fins eaten, and fates linked forever. There was a warning from this kind of magic, that things that came in twos ended that way. Theodora and Kalcyne didn’t mind. If the price to be paid was lightning in a bottle, a matching bite, and dying together when the time came, it was a small price to pay to be promised forever. It was a small price to pay for being happy with themselves and with someone else who made them just as happy.


End file.
